About six months ago I had a choice, to buy a DSLR with video or without. With was slightly expensive and the specifications weren’t really that impressive. Besides, what would I need video for anyway? My hand shakes majorly. And in any case, all the videos I’d ever taken were left largely unwatched. Finally, it was my family’s penchant for videos over photographs on birthdays and such, that led me to buy one with. You know, those videos that get made when you’ve left the camera in the corner of the room while the cake is being cut. Later everyone sits around and goes all “Dude look at how much cake you ate lol” “LMAO your face while eating cake” “WHY ON EARTH WAS I DANCING WHILE EATING”

Little did I know that the video feature would be put to other uses. And boy, am I glad.

AIESEC invited us to document one of their Udaan pre-events. They gave us a choice of dates and we elected to go to the event at…our high school! We ended up making hundreds of short video clips and looking around with dreamy, nostalgic eyes.

The clips were put together in this one awesome video by Kriti, and I think she did an AMAZING job. Did you notice how she got the voice of the girl saying ‘DPS RK Puram’ to roll over the clip of that bus? All while I was busing clicking pointless photos for gifs. Well, ok, I wasn’t really aiming for gif-worthy photos, that was just an accident.

Nevertheless, I got some pretty amazing clips, including the opening and closing one. The opening clip was epic, I was trying to get the kids to tell the camera how much fun they had. Its an effort to get them to do something in front of a camera, usually they just see one and freeze up, or worse, badger you take photographs till you run away screaming. But this one kid was the real Hindi theater type. He went all dramatic and said “haan haan, hume bahut mazaa aya”. Which was all fine till he decided to make it spicier. “Lekin ab hum kya karein? Chalo karte hain aur mazaa….ab hum karte hain romaaaaance!”. Epic, it was. I somehow got him to be serious again, but that “video action play” is actually “romance ka video action play”. I don’t even want to know where he got his ideas.

The day was filled with many more such win moments. I’m glad we did this. I’d gone into my video-crazy mode a day before, and I made a rather sweet video of cream crackers, yes you read that right. I will upload more videos once I manage to get that video editing software to actually run for me. Grr.

Ok, cheerio, I’m off to read out my list of abuses to creepy telephone stalkers.